Couple of carved early American fans

[Mike Henderson]

Okay, here's some pictures of how to carve the fan.

Early-American-fan-01.jpg
The first thing to do is the layout. I'm using a piece of scrap (glued up) mahogany that's 10" by about 6.5". Draw a horizontal line up from the bottom about 1.25" - that will come close to centering the fan.

Next, draw a perpendicular line upward in the center of the board. The intersection of that line and the previous line is the center of your semicircle.

Set your compass to a 4" radius and draw the outside of the fan. Reduce the radius to 3.75" and draw another semicircle. This is to align the scallops. Finally set your compass to 3/4" and draw the center semicircle.

Early-American-fan-02.jpg
Using a compass, divide each side of the semicircle into six parts (12 fans across the whole semicircle). You can do more or less, of course, depending on your taste.

Early-American-fan-03.jpg
Draw a line from the center to each mark - that is, lay out your fan elements.

Early-American-fan-04.jpg
We can now start the carving. Start by outlining the center semicircle. I used a 7/20 for this. Then using a big chisel, do a stop cut along the bottom of the fan, as shown in the picture.

Early-American-fan-05.jpg
Carve down around the center semicircle about 1/4".

[Mike Henderson]

Early-American-fan-06.jpg
Carve back towards the outside of the fan, with a slope from the outside to the center which is about 1/4" deep. Note that this wood has a defect in it that I cut into (a void in the wood). Since I don't plan to complete this carving I'm going to continue.

Early-American-fan-07.jpg
Redraw the lines that outline the fan elements. It's best if you don't take the lines all the way to the center element. Sometimes it's hard to get the pencil marks out of the corner. You can eyeball the rest of the cut pretty easy.

Early-American-fan-08.jpg
Use your V tool to carve along each of the lines, to outline the fan elements.

Early-American-fan-09.jpg
You can use a knife to cut down for each scallop. Just cut deeper in the center.

Early-American-fan-10.jpg
Use a #7/25 gouge to cut the scallop.

[Mike Henderson]

Early-American-fan-11.jpg
Only cut inward until the ends of the gouge are even with the outside of the fan. If you try to cut deeper, you'll damage the outline.

Early-American-fan-12.jpg
I use a #5/5 to clean up the cut. If you find that the #5 has too much sweep for your taste, use a #3/5.

Early-American-fan-13.jpg
The #7/25 is a bit narrower than the width of the fan element so use your #5/5 to extend the scallop to cover the whole end of the fan element.

Early-American-fan-14.jpg
Here, you can see that I've extended the scallop to cover the whole end of the fan element.

Early-American-fan-15.jpg
The other way to cut the back of the scallop is to use a gouge. Here I'm using a #2/8 gouge and I'm making a plunge cut but at an angle so that I go deeper in the center than along the side of the fan element.

[Mike Henderson]

Early-American-fan-16.jpg
Once you make the plunge cuts, the cut with the #7/25 is exactly the same as covered earlier.

Early-American-fan-17.jpg
I made my V tool cuts a bit deeper, rounded off the fan elements, and sanded the elements with 150 grit sandpaper.

Cleanup and round over the center element after you've done all the fan elements.

That's all there is to it.

Mike

[Gord Pat]

Well done Mike, great bit of teaching, thanks for taking the time and making the effort, much appreciated .

[Vic Castello]

These pics are great! I love watching knowledgable people carve wood. Makes me want to go right to my own bench to try it. This series of pictures reminds me of a video I own by Mack Hedley done in 1986 (but still available through Taunton Press, I think), only he did a shell instead of a fan. The techniques are very similar. Now I have to dig it out and watch it again!

[Clara Koss]

beautiful fan work.... thanks for showing it to us....

[David Keller NC]

Mike - Very interesting set of pictures. Your comment about one of the fans being "too busy" was intriguing. One of the more dissapointing aspects of the otherwise quite nice Phil Lowe article in the latest FWW was the absence of any analysis of period fans and there regional variations.

I've got a pretty extensive library on early American furniture, and there's obviously a great, though subtle, variety in the Q.A. fans of the time. A few of them that my fuzzy memory can recall did have a lot of rays, much like yours. Another observation is that there seems to have been general disagreement among the artisans of the time as to how large to make the central "sun". I've seen some that were huge, taking up perhaps 1/4 of the diameter of the entire fan, while others are quite small.

Nice work.

[Doug Shepard]

Great work as usual Mike and thanks for the how-to photos. I've always wanted to try doing something with some carved elements. Just out of curiosity, how many practice ones do you estimate before you got them to come out that well?

[Mike Henderson]

David - thank you for your comments. If you have the ability to scan some of the fan pictures in your books, I think everyone would appreciate you posting them here. In addition to getting an education, it might give people ideas for when they carve their own fans.

We all face a similar issue. When we look at the design of a carved fan (or any early American design element) we see it through modern eyes - our likes and dislikes are colored by the architecture and art of today. My preference for the first fan is probably a reflection of my preference for the simplicity and clean lines of modern furniture design.

Seeing some of the original regional designs would be very interesting and instructive.

Mike

[Mike Henderson]

Great work as usual Mike and thanks for the how-to photos. I've always wanted to try doing something with some carved elements. Just out of curiosity, how many practice ones do you estimate before you got them to come out that well?

Thanks for your kind words, Doug. I usually do one or more practice pieces but these were both first attempts. They're really not very hard to do, especially the first one.

I taught a carving class at Cerritos college last Sunday and used that first fan as a project for the class. I was filling in for another instructor so the students had a bit of experience - but not a lot. They were all able to carve the fan in a one day class - really a bit more than a half day class (from 8am to about 1:30pm).

Some, of course, were better than others.

Mike

[And just to put a shameless plug in - I'll be teaching a class on carving that fan at Woodcraft in Stanton, CA in January or February (date not set yet). Anyone in the Los Angeles area who's interested can check on the schedule here. I also teach veneer classes at Woodcraft.]

[Doug Shepard]

...
[And just to put a shameless plug in - I'll be teaching a class on carving that fan at Woodcraft in Stanton, CA in January or February (date not set yet). Anyone in the Los Angeles area who's interested can check on the schedule here. I also teach veneer classes at Woodcraft.]

We got Woodcrafts here too ya know. Let us know when you take your act on the road.

[David Keller NC]

Mike - I'll have to ask the moderators whether I can do that. Publishers are very, very fussy about copyrights. Regardless of whether an excerpt from a book would be considered "fair use", I'm pretty sure SMC doesn't want to get involved in a dispute, and there's no doubt I don't want to.

However, there are a couple of free resources that I know there's no issue with. One of them is the recent ability to search and view any of the Antiques Roadshow's appraisals from the last few years.

Here's the link to the search page:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/ (enter terms into the blue "archive" box)

And here's one original example with a fan - it didn't appraise for much because of later alterations to the top and legs, but the fan's original according to Mr. Keno:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/archive/200702A01.html

One item appraised in the last few years was a spectacular spice box with a carved fan:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/archive/200605A52.html

And - the Chipstone foundation has a wonderful digital archive of their collections with extremely high-resolution photographs. I visit this archive all the time to get interior construction views. Unfortunately, I've never found a way to paste a direct link to something in the archive, but you can visit the site by clicking on the "Chipstone and Longridge Collections" at the University of Wisconsin's digital archive site:

http://decorativearts.library.wisc.edu/

[Eric Leitner]

Hi Mike, here is a picture of my first attempt. And by first, I really mean it, got my gouges friday, have never tried carving before this.
A couple of things I know I did wrong. First was, while roughing out the waste, the gouge slipped and took out a piece of the center circle.
Next and probably my biggest error was when roughing out the waste, I wasn't consistent enough and went too deep in spots, mainly closer to the outer edge. The picture doesn't show it very well but there are hollows and my fans don't have a domed shape everywhere along their length.
I used the bent gouge shown in the photo to do most of the rounding over. Any suggestions on what gouge to use for that? I was pretty happy with it but not having any experience, don't know if something else would have handled it better.
As for the v gouge, I had some trouble keeping it cutting straight lines. Any tips on that? It also seemed to want to remove more stock on the right side of the blade. I am sure that is my technique but once again, not sure how to correct it. I was using a 90 degree v, seems a 45 might be better? Cut deeper but not as wide?
One last thing, should I be using a mallet for all my cuts? Since I am using basswood, I used hand pressure without the mallet for a lot of shaping. Is this a bad habit to fall into? I do want to carve mahogany and other harder woods.
I really want to thank you for the inspiration to try this, never would have if I didn't come across your excellent tutorials.

[Eric Leitner]

Heres a better picture of it.